Thumbsucking at the Intersection of Mental Health, Politics, and Pop Culture

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The Old Normal

Just how the hell does anybody on a regular Monday-to-Friday workweek ever get anything done? I mean, aside from work work?

For the entire month of November, and the first few weeks of December, I was on a Monday-to-Friday, 8-to-5 schedule. This was only the second time in over 20 years that I had been on such a schedule—the previous time being the training period for a new job, just like the most recent episode of “normalcy” was.

I was commuting at the same time as everybody else (read: taking almost three times as long to get to and from work as the trip should actually take). I was having lunch at the same time as everybody else (god help anyone who only has a half-hour at noon to try and get out to procure some nourishment—thankfully, I only had to do this a few times, and had a full hour for lunch).

I was doing my grocery and other shopping when everyone else was—either on my way home after work, or on the weekends—when the stores are at their peak crowdedness. Navigating a single aisle at the grocery store, waiting for people to make their decisions and get out of the way, or waiting for them just to notice they were blocking the entire aisle by hanging onto a corner of their angled grocery cart while staring at a wall of spaghetti sauce, was trying. And forget all of those little errands—running to the post office, for example—the extra-long lunch-hour or Saturday morning lines—uggh!

Everything seemed to take much longer than it should have. Everywhere seemed so much more crowded than it needed to be.

I felt crushed by this tyranny of scheduling normalcy, this chronometrically-imposed and enforced bottlenecking. Just how do people do this, day in and day out? How do they ever get anything done beyond the extra-slow commutes, and the added imposition of everybody else doing the same damn thing at the same damn time—or at least trying to?

Aaaaagh! I feel like a stretched-out, messed-up face pinned down by a floppy clock! Or is that a decapitated, vomiting swan, wearing a fake beard pinned down by a floppy clock?

I forced myself through the daily tasks I absolutely had to complete, and blew off the rest for the weekend, and then blew them off again, as if maybe this next week I wouldn’t feel so tired after spending most of my waking hours devoted to work and the process of getting there and back.

Weekends felt short. By the time I felt rested and started in on that to-do list, the to-do list was necessarily pared down a great deal, with Sunday evening and Monday morning hanging over my head–sending me into to-do list despair.

I suddenly understood the asshole-ish behaviors of driving a bit too fast and recklessly to get that parking spot, the feigned ‘oh-I-didn’t-see-you-and-that’s-why-I-let-that-door-swing-shut-in-your-face-rather-than-chancing-you-getting-ahead-of-me-in-that-long-f***ing-line,’ the impossibly tight closing of the gap between one’s own car and the one just ahead to prevent anyone from merging and making the commute take even nine seconds longer. I suddenly understood these behaviors. I did not engage in these behaviors. It seems it would take years of this ‘regular workday’ harshness before one would be pushed to such extremes. But I was just a tourist here in normal-land. I knew I would be leaving before long. I didn’t have to act that way.

The particulars of the situation helped me appreciate what I had experienced for so long, in terms of scheduling and work. When my kid was little, I was self-employed, working out of the home. All that time, getting her to and from school was a pleasant walk or a short drive—a little break in the work day. I could attend to tasks at my own pace, except in the few ‘busy seasons’ when all hell broke loose and I had to hunker down for a few weeks or a month, working every waking minute, except for those quick trips to the school and back.

Later on, when I angled toward jobs in the mental health field that required shift work, it was so much easier to work all night, or in the evenings, and take care of all those other daily tasks when very few others were. There were several periods when I was allowed to knock out 40-hour workweeks in three days, leaving the rest of the week free—or for much of that time, free to go to grad school or work a second job. At any rate, I wasn’t tied to the same schedule as the bulk of the rest of the working world.

I’m now back to a bit of the old normal—a work schedule that helps keep me from needing to move about too much in the peak hours of the work-imposed world. I’m thankfully off of graves—not that I hated that—but it takes a toll, especially when you’re trying to spend some normal day hours with family and friends, and working occasionally at a second job that takes place during the day. I’m back to having a few weekdays and a weekend day off, a schedule of four tens–and with no second job sapping hours from my days off.

I’m trying to get back to where I can spend my days off getting some stuff done—like writing on a sort-of-regular basis, or getting back to those projects around the house that are perpetually sidetracked or shelved. But I’m also having to undo a number of bad habits and weird practices that still linger after years of being up all night most nights, and sleeping during the day. Hell, I started writing the rough draft of this just before 2 a.m. since I fell asleep early and then couldn’t stay asleep through the night.

Still, the adjustment to the new schedule isn’t nearly as rough as the adjustment to the ‘normal’ world of the rest of the day-walkers. I’m settling in to something of the old normal—awake and working during the days—just not always when the rest of you humans are clogging everything up.

While I enjoyed the training I was doing, it wasn’t really all that fun visiting your overcrowded, poorly scheduled world, and I definitely wouldn’t want to live there.